End of Summer is near... :(

Well today Avery is officially 13 months old! I haven't taken any official 13 month pictures.... I may stop with that. She is STILL not walking!!! I took her to this "Mommy and Me" swim class for the past two weeks and I had signed her up for the "Walker's class" ages, 1-3.... however she was not walking. It didn't really matter though since we were in the water the whole time. When it was time for her to practice jumping into the pool to me, I just held her hands while she stood there and kind of lifted her in to me with a little jump action. She loved it and pretty soon was just walking into the pool again the second I would lift her out. She loves the water. She started to associate me getting my swimsuit on with it being time for her swim lessons and she would start crawling to the door as soon as I had our swimsuits on like, "Come on! Let's go swimming!!!"

Caleb only has one more gymnastics lesson for the Summer and Gabe finished soccer the first week of August. I can't believe this is the last full week of Summer vacation. They start school on the 28th. For Caleb, I had requested afternoon kindergarten with Mrs. Jensen (Gabe didn't have her but he had a teacher that isn't there anymore, but Mrs. Jensen took her place and  the same aide is there, and our neighbor's kids had her and said she was good.) However, apparently when the new principal took over this Summer (the old one moved to the high school) they decided to throw out everyone's requests because Caleb was assigned MORNINGS with Mrs. Sutton (the opposite of what I requested) and my new neighbor who had requested mornings, was assigned AFTERNOONS with Mrs. Jensen! We were both like, "Seriously?! Is it give people the opposite of what they asked for day???" So we went over to the school and tracked down the secretary and told her to switch our two boys straight across. That should be easy enough right? She said she would, so hopefully that all got squared away. I am showing up with Caleb in the afternoon next Wednesday. Gabe got a teacher named Mrs. Baird. I don't know her at all so hopefully she's good! He did get put into the same class as his best friend, Carter, so I think that's all he really cares about.

That's all I can think of for tonight! I will need to find some pictures to post. Oh yeah. Josh and my 9 year anniversary is tomorrow. 9 years! Whoa. We should really start saving for a Hawaii trip next year.

The Zoo (for Avery's Birthday)

Here are also some pictures from our trip to the zoo that we took for Avery's birthday! I think now I am FINALLY caught up on my blog from the events of the past 3 months!!! Phew!

The Pinchy Smile

Okay, I mentioned in a previous post that Avery has a very distinct smile she makes when we are going crazy making faces at her, trying to GET her to smile, but she is trying NOT to and gives us this little pinchy face smile instead. Here are her pinchy smiles.... :)

Outdoor Adventures with Dad!

Josh had all these pictures on his phone of the kids and him doing fun stuff outside. He took them yesterday for a horse ride at his sister's house and they had a blast. I stayed home and enjoyed a little time to myself and worked a little on my Etsy shop, which I have calculated out that I am working for exactly .12 cents per hours right now. Haha, just kidding. I have gotten some sales, but I would love to get to the point where I am getting about 5 sales a week (1 every day Monday through Friday.) We will see how long that takes. If I ever got to the point where I was doing three a day Monday through Friday I would think that was just right. Maybe I will be to that point in a few years! But right now I can just say it's a really fun hobby that has been earning me an average of about $20-30 extra per week. Yeehaw! Big money! If that could eventually bump up to the $500 - $1000 per month range I would consider it a great success. So we'll see!

But back to the point, Josh is a wonderful husband and took all three kids away on Saturday so I could work on some stuff. Here are some pictures I stole from his phone! Oh! And Gabe lost his first FRONT TOOTH! He has already just lost and grown in his two middle bottom ones. So this is the third one he's lost! He's growing up!!!

Happy First Birthday Avery!!!

Can you believe it? My little baby girl is growing up. I will have to update this on Monday after her checkup, but I am guessing her weight is about 22 pounds (she has definitely grown up and not out lately) and she is probably about 32 inches long? (UPDATE! She weighed 24 pounds and was 31.5 inches long! 100th percentile for height and 95th for weight!) She can easily wear a size 24 month sleeper for length. Otherwise she mostly wears 18m shorts and tshirts. Her hair keeps getting longer and is starting to flip out a little! She has four teeth (two top and two bottom middle) and is in the process of getting the four more "incisors" next to them. It is crazy because Gabe didn't get his first tooth till he was 13 months old!

We also finally just turned her carseat forward. I guess the law is like, have to be certain pounds, certain, height, and 1 year old. So she is easily the height, and now she is 1 year old, the weight she is probably just on the borderline.... but her poor legs were to the point they were curled up when she was sitting in her carseat backwards. It needed to be done. There's a picture down below of her and she has her legs still curled up, she's probably like, "This is how I usually had to sit in my car seat before!" haha

She sleeps pretty good now at night. Naps are pretty different every day but usually one from 10-11:30 and another from 2:00 - 4:30 would be my perfect day. That doesn't always happen though, especially when they boys' activities make it impossible.

She started crawling all of a sudden the last day when we were in Wisconsin (June 30?) and she is pretty fast now. We have to watch her to make sure she doesn't get to the stairs in the living room. She LOVES animals, especially dogs. We took her to the zoo for her birthday and she would point and growl at the lions. She also loves the water and splashing in the bath. When we give her a sippy cup of water she purposely gets some in her mouth and then lets it drizzle down her face to the point that she gets soaking wet. I guess she likes swimming in her sippy cup water.

Another thing about her, she has this sweet little smile she does where it is like, she doesn't want to really give you a full smile, so she pinches her lips and doesn't show her teeth, like, "Fine, I will just give you this." I will have to find some pictures of it... It is her, "I know you want me to smile cause you're acting like a fool to try and get me to, but I don't want to give in," smile.

She is such a joy to have around and I am so glad we have her now so I can be done having babies!!!! Yay!!! hahaha

Avery Monthly.... A trip down memory lane

She looks pretty sad at eight months, probably because she had RSV around that time... :( Also, now that she is one, you will notice for her first birthday we finally bought her a shirt. hahahahaha

Logan Trip, Caleb's 5th Birthday, Wisconsin Trip, Summer Sports, Avery is almost a year!

Wow! I am behind! So I usually have tried to post once a month around Avery's monthly birthday but I totally missed her 11 month one because we were in Wisconsin!!! Sorry Avery! There will forever be a gap in your monthly pictures between 10 months and 1 year! :(

So, since I posted last, we had lots of big things going on.

FIRST! We took a kind of last-minute drive to Logan, Utah because my mom and Jesse were coming out to Salt Lake for a wedding and said if we met them in Logan they would give us some food storage! We were bribed, but it was worth it. We also got to experience a restaurant called "Chuck-O-Rama" for the first time. Don't be fooled by the vomit-sounding name folks, it was actually very classy and good. :) Then we drove over to the Logan Temple and took some great pictures. I had never been to Logan before and I gotta say it is very beautiful! It looks like a castle/temple! So we were just there for a few hours and then drove back home! A lot of driving, but I got to see my mom! And it wasn't so hard saying good-bye knowing we'd see them again in less than a month!

SECOND! Caleb turned 5!!! My big little boy weighs about 60 pounds, wears size 7 clothes, and size 13 shoes, and definitely has no shortage of testosterone in his body. He resorts to punching his brother daily (which we try to stop, but honestly Gabe DOES know how to push his buttons and does it way too often on purpose) He can also be so sweet and cuddly and I think it's obvious he was the baby for four years because sometimes he totally pretends he can't do something (i.e. put on his own shoes) which I know he CAN do, just in order to get mom to do it for him. Hopefully he will become a little bit more independent and confident this fall when he starts Kindergarten. Right now, his best friends are the neighborhood kids, which are also Gabe's friends, and I fear too often he gets left out and it' really starting to affect his self-esteem. Just tonight he was telling me before bed time that nobody likes him. At first I thought he was just being dramatic to get sympathy from mom, but now I am starting to worry he actually believes that. I hope he can make some friends in Kindergarten that are just his. Gabe just gets how to play with kids. He is naturally someone that attracts people  because he just has that personality. Unfortunately, Caleb often gets left out then and not chosen over Gabe. But Caleb just says the funniest things without even realizing it. Even adults tell me how awesome he is. He just needs to realize it when it comes to his friends. I love my little Caleb and am so glad he is in our family - especially because of the constant entertainment he provides! But onto his party now!

His birthday was June 6th but Josh was out of town so we waited until he got back and had his neighborhood, backyard party on Saturday the 8th. I like that his birthday is during the Summer so I can be lame and just tell everyone in the neighborhood to come over and play. I have always done these planned out, theme parties for Gabe (age 5: Pirate Party in our apartment movie theater with all 20 kids from his preschool... age 6: Dinosaur Party, with dino egg hunt, jello dino fossils, etc.... age 7: Lego Party...) so I feel a little neglectful having these lame backyard parties for Caleb, but he hasn't complained yet! I even suggested we do it at the local spray park for a change of pace, but he said he wanted it at our house! Technically the theme was the Avengers, but we didn't really have much organization. There was a piñata, a "Pin the star" on Captain America's shield game, and some water balloons. I also had my friend make his birthday cake, so that looked good. But it was a pretty relaxed party. Which I needed because Josh had been out of town for the previous 6 days and then worked the following week for 80 hours!!! Seriously, it was crazy. He worked everyday right up until we left for Wisconsin. That brings me to event number 3!

THIRD! Wisconsin trip!!! We left for Wisconsin on Tuesday, June 18th and got there June 19th. It took us two full days to get there. On the first day we made great time and made it all the way to Fargo, ND (right on the border of Minnesota). Then the second day, we took a slight detour to the Mall of America so that Gabe, our Lego fanatic, could see Lego Land. I think it is different now than it used to be. Before it was more of a museum. Now it is more of a giant store. But it was still cool nonetheless The boys had been working hard to earn "fuzzies" in their fuzzy jars for the past month and each fuzzy was equivalent to $1 (a pretty large rate I thought... but it was dad's idea), so they each had about $25 to spend on a toy. They each picked out a Lego set - Gabe a "Golden Ninjago" set and Caleb an Iron Man Boat set. The other exciting part of the Mall of America was that this lady and her young son ended up GIVING us a free pass to go on about $80 worth of rides!!! It was crazy. We were just standing around, looking confused I guess, and trying to decide which one ride to let the kids go one because they were about 5 bucks per person per ride, and this lady comes over and says, "Do you guys have wristbands or tickets yet?" and we were like, "No, we are still trying to figure it all out." And she goes, "Our school sells these mystery tickets as a fundraiser and we have been here for a while and are ready to leave. They expire today and this one has about $80 in points left on it. We want to give it to a family that will enjoy it. Do you want it?" I swear, I may have actually teared up a little. It was awesome!!! So then the boys went on about 10 rides and Josh and I took turns riding with them. We did that for a couple of hours, then ate lunch at Rainforest Cafe. I spent about 20 minutes in Forever 21 (which could have easily been more like 3 hours, but it was probably good I only spent 20 minutes) and then we were on our way by about 4:00.

Once we were in Wisconsin, we spent a lot of time going to rummage sales (I returned home with two huge garbage bags full of kids clothes in our car-top carrier), eating out (Josh and I returned home with 15 extra pounds collectively), and doing a small-turned-large landscaping project at my mom's house. It started one day because we had gotten locked out and had to go around to the back yard and try to get in the deck door. While we were back there, we were like, "Whoa! This is soooo overgrown! We should weed this and put down pavers for her." So we did that (by we I mean Josh) and then decided we should just do it all. So we ended up tearing out her 20 year old bushes that were pretty ratty and overgrown and putting in all new rock, retaining wall border, and shrubs. It was an experience. Hopefully it lasts her the next 20 years.

We also got to see my brother's wife and kids who were visiting from Montana. Funny that they live in Montana and we live in Idaho and we meet in Wisconsin to see each other for the first time in about 2 years!

The kids also had fun at the Madison Zoo, Lakeside Park with Grandpa Jack, going to McDonald's, and the Fondy waterpark. It was a good Summer trip, but Josh was happy to get home to Idaho where the night time temperatures average about 55 degrees.

FOURTH! The boys have been into lots of Summer activities. The did T-Ball in the first half of June, but then missed the last two weeks of it when we were in Wisconsin. That's ok though. It was their first T-Ball experience and it was definitely not too serious. Caleb was often busy talking to the baseman of the other team when he was supposed to be running to the next base. His coach would have to yell, "Caleb!!! Ruuuun!!!" and then he'd be like, "Oh! Gotta go! Talk to you later! bye! and jog over to the next base. I think football will be more his sport.

Now we are back and Gabe is doing Soccer for the month of July and Caleb is doing gymnastics weekly for the rest of the Summer. Gabe had his second game recently. They did not win, sadly, BUT Gabe scored one of the team's 3 goals!!! It was on my birthday so he was pretty excited.

Yes, I will add briefly that I turned 29. I guess I have 1 good year left. It's all downhill from 30.... :(

FINALLY! Sweet little Avery is definitely growing up! Her birthday is next week and she is getting so much more mobile and fun! Also, I think she is getting more teeth (to add to the four she already has!) because her sleeping has been horrible the past few nights! I hope that passes soon!

Well I have about a million pictures to go through, so those will be coming later!

(Here they are! Finally.... and this is about 1 tenth of them all...)